Sermons
Here we try to publish as many of the sermons given in St Edward's as possible. The majority of them are given by Father Dylan James, our Parochial Administrator, but visiting priests obviously preach as well. Where possible we publish their sermons too but, sadly, they do not always make them available and we do not record or transcribe them.
To read a sermon, simply click on the date that you would like to see.
If you would like to see the sermons from 2009, please click here.
If you would like to see the sermons from 2008, please click here.
25th July 2010, 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
27th June 2010, 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
20th June 2010, 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
13th June 2010, 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
6th June 2010, Corpus Christi
30th May 2010, Trinity Sunday
23rd May 2010, Pentecost
16th May 2010, Ascension Sunday
9th May 2010, Sixth Sunday of Easter
2nd May 2010, Fifth Sunday of Easter25th April 2010, Fourth Sunday of Easter
11th April 2010, Second Sunday of Easter
4th April 2010, Easter Sunday
3rd April 2010, Easter Vigil
2nd April 2010, Good Friday
1st April 2010, Maundy Thursday28th March 2010, Passion Sunday
21st March 2010, Fifth Sunday in Lent
14th March 2010, Fourth Sunday in Lent
7th March 2010, Third Sunday in Lent
28th February 2010, Second Sunday in Lent
21st February 2010, First Sunday in Lent
14th February 2010, Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
7th February 2010, Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
31st January 2010, Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
24th January 2010, Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
17th January 2010, Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
10th January 2010, The Baptism of The Lord
3rd January 2010, The Epiphany
Other occasional texts - these are not published with any regularity and so are listed here in the order in which they are written, circulated or published.
14th February 2010 - on Fasting & Abstinence
This paper was circulated with the newsletter on 14th February 2010 - the weekend before the beginning of Lent.
Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are ‘Days of Fasting and Abstinence’, which means that:
All Catholics age 14 and older are required to abstain:
“The law of abstinence forbids the eating of meat, but eggs, milk products, and condiments made from meat may be eaten. Fish and all cold blooded animals may be eaten, e.g., frogs, clams, turtles, etc.”
All Catholics age 18 and older, but under the age of 59, are required to fast:
“The law of fast prescribes that only one full meal a day is taken. [In addition] Two lighter meals are permitted to maintain strength according to each one's needs. Eating between meals is not permitted, but liquids, including milk and fruit juices, are allowed.”
(Pope Paul VI, Paenitemini, 1966, (the current law in 2010)).
Fasting and abstaining are important ways for us to unite ourselves with Our Lord’s 40 days in the desert. Christ fasted, the Early Church fasted, and Christians down through the ages have fasted. All fasting helps us grow in spiritual self-discipline to prevent future sin and helps us offer up penance in reparation for our past sins. Abstaining is a mild form of fasting in that we deny ourselves a particular pleasure, namely meat. By observing these days as communal fast days we join with the whole Church across the world in acknowledging the importance of these particular days. Children and the elderly are strongly encouraged to fast even when the law does not bind them (Canon 1252), or to offer up some other acts of self-denial.
And in case you were wondering… Canon Law specifies: If your 14th or 18th birthday happens to fall on a ‘day of fasting and abstinence’ then you are not required to fast/abstain. However, if your 59th birthday (or any other birthday apart from your 14th or your 18th) falls on a day of fasting then you are bound by the law of fasting; the obligation ceases on the next day. Sorry.
14th February 2010 - 'Giving it up' for Lent
This paper was circulated with the newsletter on 14th February 2010 - the weekend before the beginning of Lent.
The practice of ‘giving something up for Lent’ is an important way of fasting. Fasting is good for us for four reasons:
First, at a human level, like dieting, fasting disciplines our desires. The things of this world are good, but we frequently want them in a way that is bad for us, or we want the wrong things at the wrong time. We need to discipline our desires, and this is what fasting does. This doesn’t mean we fast continually: Christians have feast days as well as fast days, but fasting enables discipline.
Second, at a supernatural level, more than mere dieting, fasting is a prayer. It thus needs to be offered to God; ‘offer your very bodies as a living sacrifice acceptable to God’ (Rom 12:1). In particular, fasting is something we can offer for our sins: in atonement and reparation for past sins, by uniting them to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. In general, fasting is something we can offer as a prayer for matters of great importance, as Christ told his disciples that some things can only be achieved by ‘prayer and fasting’ (Mk 9:29). Also, during Lent, uniting prayer and fasting imitates our Lord who both prayed and fasted in his 40 days in the Desert. Fasting without praying can sometimes just make us grumpy and disagreeable!
Third, fasting (and any form of penance) is also a means of detachment: when we deny ourselves some form of pleasure we help to detach ourselves from it; this helps to orient ourselves more on God and less on earthly things.
Fourth, fasting can change the way we act towards others. If we’re purifying and detaching ourselves, then we should be more free to love. One way we do this is by the traditional Lenten practice of giving to the poor.
Finally, this can be summed up by noting the Church’s threefold Lenten remedy for sin: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (giving to the poor). These three should all go together, not in opposition, i.e. it’s not enough to say, ‘Oh, I’m not giving up things, I’m doing something positive!’ Each of us would do well to add a small part of each of these three to our Lenten season: add a small prayer to your usual daily or weekly routine, give something up for Lent, and give some money to a good charity.
The Sermons
25th July 2010, 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Lk 11:1-13
We just heard Jesus speak of the importance of asking in prayer and of the heavenly Father's wish to grant our prayers. I'd like to tell you about a prayer of mine that was answered recently.
When we think about God answering prayer we often wonder why He grants some requests and not others. And, we all know the trial of an unanswered prayers, or, more precisely, we all know the trial of when the answer to our prayers is “no”. While we don't know in this life why He grants one request and not another, we do know that we will somehow understand in Heaven. But, for many of our prayers part of the reason that some are granted and some are not is whether we are praying that something that is TRULY for our good: God does not grant a request that will ultimately be to our supernatural disadvantage. St James indicates this when he says, “you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly” (Jam 4:3), and Jesus indicates something of the same when He says that the type of prayer that we can be SURE will be answered is to pray for the Holy Spirit (Lk 11:13).
But on to my prayer, and perhaps I first need to tell you where I'd been –these past few weeks: The first Sunday I was away I was on holiday, and then the next two Sundays I was helping to lead a youth pilgrimage around a great number of shrines in France.
And at the end of this, on my way home, exhausted but inspired by all that I had seen, I prayed after the example of the saints who shrines I have seen. In particular, inspired by the example of the patron saint of parish priests, the holy Cure D’Ars, I prayed that Jesus would help me bear suffering and difficulty the way that the saints did; I prayed that Jesus would give me a greater share in the cross.
I made this prayer for a greater share in the cross while at the entrance to the airport on my way home, and Jesus promptly granted my request by cancelling my flight. I then had a 3 hour wait on a line to discover that all of the other ways home were booked and that I was stuck there for the next 2 days. It wasn’t exactly how I had wanted Him to answer my request! And wiser men than myself have taught the inadvisability of praying for an increase in the cross.
However, as a consequence of my delay I was able to use those days to visit some more shrines, in Paris. I visited the shrine of Our Lady of Victories which bears great testimony to answered prayers. Many of you will know the life of St Therese of Lisieux, whose relics toured England last year, and you’ll know that as a child she lay sick and dying in a prolonged and incurable illness – her father had prayers offered to this shrine of Our Lady of Victories; Our Lady then appeared to St Therese, and she was cured. And her cure is just one of many there. The walls of this large church are lined with THOUSANDS of plaques of thanksgiving from people who have had prayers answered there. And this reminded me very powerfully that God DOES answer prayer. Earlier on the pilgrimage I had seen other churches with large walls lined with similar plaques of thanksgiving – in Ars and Lourdes.
All these plaques were a reminder to me of a very particular point: the importance of ASKING for things in our prayer. And this I had further reminder of in another additional shrine I went to: the Rue du Bac, in Paris, the shrine of the Miraculous Medal. It was there, in 1830, that Our Lady appeared to St Catherine Laboure, and in the vision Our Lady appeared with rings on her fingers; some of these rings shed light and some did not, and when St Catherine asked why Our Lady told her that this symbolised the many graces that people failed to gain because they did not ask for them.
And this is not just a point from a private revelation but is part of our Catholic teaching, as articulated by the likes of St Thomas Aquinas as part of the doctrine of merit, that there are many graces that we fail to get because we do not ask. So we SHOULD ask.
And this is the key point is today’s readings. Abraham prayed for Sodom and Gomorrah, and God granted his prayer. The parables of Jesus taught us the importance of asking in prayer. And the history and experience of the Church, down through the centuries and in the lives of many of us here, shows us that God DOES answer prayer and so we should ask, and do so with the confidence of a child who knows that his Father loves him. “Ask and you will receive” (Lk 11:9).
27th June 2010, 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Gal 5:1,13-18.
How do I know what the Holy Spirit is saying to me?
In our 2nd reading we heard St Paul talk about being “guided by the Spirit”, and people often wonder what this means in practice. I’ve been pondering this a lot recently; one very useful book I’ve read is listed in this week’s newsletter: Jacques Philippe, In the School of the Holy Spirit (Sceptre Press, 2007).
To talk a simple example from my daily life: in trying to plan what to do this Saturday afternoon, does the Lord want me to pray for an hour, or visit the sick for an hour?
Does He want me to call my Mother on the phone, or write a better sermon?
These are all good things, but doing one means I won’t do the other. Which does the Holy Spirit want me to do?
Now, pondering these things can get taken to extremes. I’ve heard pious young ladies (in particular) ask whether God wants them to wear a red shirt or a blue dress today?
For me, that’s an easy answer. He wants me to wear a black shirt, again.
But generally speaking, it’s not really meaningful to ask what colour shirt the Holy Spirit wants you to wear
- to ask a question like that is a misguided piety.
A mis-directed piety, but basically starting with the right premise: I should want to do God’s Will, and He has a Will for every detail of my life.
However, for most details of my life, the way He speaks to me is much more mundane. He has given me a brain, the ability to reason. If He has not given me any other reason to think He has a specific answer to a question, which with many questions He hasn’t, then He just wants me to use my reason to decide which colour shirt to wear.
But there are ways we can discern what the Lord wants us to do:
First, is it a matter of sin, a matter that the Bible or the Church clearly teaches me? For example, I don’t need to pray about whether I should sleep with another’s man wife – we just know that the Bible and the Church tell us that this is the sin of adultery.
Second, it is a matter that my state of life makes clear? Like a duty as a parent or a worker or a boss?
Third, is there some other matter that indicates it is a matter of sin?
None of these cases need much sophisticated analysis, but all of them DO show me what the Holy Spirit is telling me.
And, to be open to the Holy Spirit in subtle things, I need to be in the habit of being open to Him in those more basic things.
Having that spirit of openness to His Will is what will enable me to be better able to detect His promptings in more subtle things – but that, in many ways, is a later skill.
What do I mean? Well, we heard St Paul contrast the promptings of the Holy Spirit with those of “self-indulgence”(Gal 5:17). Let’s consider the self-indulgence of laziness: If the entire goal of my day is to get to that TV show at the end of the day. If the entire goal of my afternoon is set on that cake with my tea. Then I am not going to let other things get in the way of ME, my priorities, my pleasures.
These might not be big pleasures, often they might not be sins – at least not sinful in themselves, only in how I might be attached to them.
But if my priorities are such that these things mean more to me than anything else, then I am not going to be open to the Holy Spirit’s promptings.
And so CONTRASTING within ourselves the promptings of self-indulgence with those of the Spirit, and seeking to DETACH ourselves from self-indulgence, is a key way that will led us to be in that “liberty” (Gal 5:13) that St Paul spoke of, a liberty where we are not enslaved by the desire of the flesh.
So, if I want to grow in my ability to be able to discern what the Holy Spirit is prompting me to do, that detachment from self is a key place to start.
20th June 2010, 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Most of us tend not to think about the Old Testament part of the Bible very much, we certainly don’t tend to read it and identify ourselves with the Israelites there. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as Israelites, or as Jewish, or as children of Abraham.
However, in our 2nd reading St Paul says that we “are the posterity of Abraham, the heirs he was promised” (Gal 3:29).
Now, this raises a few questions: Why would I WANT to be a heir of Abraham?
To answer that question we need to go back to almost the very beginning of the Bible, the beginning of the Old Testament, i.e. the Jewish, Scriptures, to encounter the person of Abraham.
Abraham wasn’t anyone special – and this is a key point.
He was no-one special and yet God chose him, chose him to bless him.
Abraham was a wandering nomad (Dt 26:5), as the great creedal statement of the Old Testament says: “My father was a wandering Aramean “ (Deut 26:5)
Abraham had no land, he was no-one special, but God chose him to bless him.
And God made him three promises (Gen 12:1-7):
(1) “I will make you a great nation” (12:2); with descendants as many as the stars of the heavens (Gen 15:5)
(2) The Promised Land: “To your descendents I will give this land” (12:7)
(3) His name would be great: “all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you” (12:3).
In our modern world we are so used to think of ourselves as complete individuals that much of what was promised to Abraham may not seem very relevant.
But, for most of human history people have not just viewed themselves as individuals, but have considered the family, the tribe, the nation that they belonged to as something incredibly important – something that they depended on for their existence. Without this sense of belonging a person would be weak and vulnerable and fearful.
In such a context, to be promised a land, and be promised a great number in your tribe, and to belong to such a great body, would be a great thing.
Even today, though modern people give much less thought to their nation or group, even today we often worry about our weakness, our vulnerability and our lack of security.
And so to have the promise made to Abraham be something we share in is important.
What was true of Abraham physically is true for us spiritually.
He was promised an earthly home, a land.
We are promised a spiritual home, heaven – this is an even greater promise because unlike an earthly land it will not suffer physical ills like drought, and will be eternal not temporary.
He was promised a physical family.
As the Church, we are part of the spiritual family of all those in Christ.
To be an inheritor of the promise made to Abraham is to inherit the promise of the Promised Land.
We, as Christians, follow Christ the Jewish Messiah. And Christ was not just the Messiah but as such was THE great descendent of Abraham, THE offspring of Abraham (Gal 3:16) – the promises to Abraham were realised in Christ.
By being baptised into Christ WE were re-born as one with Him in inheriting all that He has promised as the seed of Abraham. Including the Promised Land of Heaven, the eternal security it will bring, and the glad fruits of that happy land.
And that is something that every reasonable person should want to share in, should want to be a child of Abraham.
13th June 2010, 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Lk 7:36-50; 2 Sam 12:7-10,13
Friday was feast of Sacred Heart of Jesus, this month of June is month of Sacred Heart. Our readings today pick up on SacHrt themes: love, sin, forgiveness, repentance, acts of love, acts of reparation.
The devotion to the Sacred Heart comes us to largely via visions to St Margaret Mary in 17th Century France. These visions were signs of the love God bears towards us.
SIGNS of Gods love for us are very important. We all have such signs, but we can either see them or fail to see them.
St Thomas Aquinas says that to love someone means to wish the good of that person, in particular, to wish specific goods for that person.
I fail to see the signs of God’s love for me when I focus instead on the things that seem to indicate that God does not love. I can want better health, better appearance, more money. And, if God wanted to, I could have a body like Rambo, a face like Brad Pitt, an IQ like Einstein, and I could win the lottery, tonight, and even England could win the World Cup.
God could give me all these things. He has given me none of them.
If God loves me, why has He not given me the goods I have just listed?
This is not a stupid question. It’s a question people ask in many different forms.
The reason God has not given me a good like possessing an IQ like Einstein is that He wishes to give me DIFFERENT goods, goods that FOR ME are incompatible with being Einsteinian (if that’s a word). I’m pretty sure that if I had such an IQ I would be insufferably arrogant and proud, that my pride would be an insufferable and impenetrable barrier for me loving God, that I would spend eternity in the blazing fires of Hell. So if God gave me such a gift, it would hardly be a sign that He loved me.
St Thomas Aquinas also says that the most important goods are spiritual goods. These are most important because they last forever.
But even such spiritual goods are not all equal. Some are more pivotal than others.
The greatest good is Heaven itself. I don’t possess that, but I hope to one day.
There is another good, a good we witness twice in our readings, a good that is the precondition for getting to Heaven: and that is the good of forgiveness.
I do not deserve Heaven. I often think I do. But the simple truth is that I have often sinned, and each sin makes me unworthy of Heaven.
But God has offered me that great spiritual good of forgiveness. A good that makes the possession of Heaven possible. A good, more than any other good in this life, a good that shows me He loves me.
The gift of such a good from God calls for us to give something in return.
David, after he repented of his sin, knew he needed to make amendment for his sins.
The woman with the alabaster jar, she had sinned, sinned so much that scripture simply recorded her as “a sinful woman in the city”. Yet Jesus forgave her. And she wanted to do some small thing back to Him, to anoint Him. Why? Because she loved Him.
Jesus pointed out in that parable that she loved much because she had been forgiven much. She KNEW the greatness of her NEED to be forgiven.
ALL of us NEED to be forgiven, even though our awareness of it varies. Love follows that awareness, love seeks to return the love God has shown us in the tenderness His Sacred Heart has revealed to us.
We each need to think of that woman known only as “a sinful woman in the city”, and realise that that is how the angels in Heaven could be looking at us. Unworthy wretches. It is only if we see ourselves in that woman that we can see the greatness of the gift of forgiveness.
To come back to the question of the SIGNS of His love for us. Its very easy to get distracted by thinking of other goods we’d like. But the ONE real good we need is on offer to each of us. The love of His Sacred Heart as manifested in His forgiveness.
In His vision to St Margaret Mary, Jesus said, “I will bless the home I which my heart is exposed and honoured”. The honour He calls us to pay is to love Him back.
On today's feast of Corpus Christi I want to say a few words about something very dear to my heart , namely, genuflection. A genuflection, I want to tell you today, is a simple thing and getting it right or failing to get it right makes a big difference: many of the problems in our spiritual lives can be resolved by a good genuflection because making a good genuflection re-orients us properly to the Lord and helps us regain focus.
The popular Cardinal Hume, shortly before he died, issued a pastoral letter in which he called for the rediscovery of the practice of genuflection. Now on one level this was a rather odd thing for him to say, because genuflection had never been abolished, yet it had somehow drifted out of practice in many places, or when it is done it somehow feels that it's not being done as well as it used to be. And so he called for us to restore the practice of genuflection.
To get back to basics, what are we talking about we talk about a genuflection? A genuflection is the “act of bending the right knee to the floor”, to quote the Catholic Encyclopaedia (Catholic Encyclopaedia, 1991). Or, to quote the post-Vatican II Ceremonial, “A genuflection, made by bending only the right knee to the ground, signifies adoration, and is therefore reserved for the Blessed Sacrament” (Ceremonial (1989) n.69). This is a very ancient form of doing homage. And in order that this act of homage may be a religious act, it is customary to make a brief little prayer when we move our body in this way, for example, to say St Thomas’s words, “My Lord and my God”(Jn 20:28).
Now, there are some people who come in to church but don't bend their knee all the way down to the ground, they do a kind of wiggle thing instead. While there are other people who bend their knee fully, but do so while not looking at the tabernacle but rather looking at someone else, maybe saying "Hi Joe!" etc. This raises the question of why its important to do this properly, which is the same as asking why we do this at all.
Now, we don't live in a society where people normally get down on their knees to anybody! So, for us to think about what a genuflection means involves thinking a bit more broadly.
Let me make a comparison. How would you behave if you went to meet the Queen? This is probably the only place left in our secular British culture where an act of reverence is made to a person. When you meet the Queen you bow to her if you are a man or curtsey if you are a woman. That said, not everybody would bow to the Queen: if you are a republican and are opposed to the monarchy you might well refuse to bow to the Queen. Whereas, if you believe in the value of a constitutional monarchy, and if you've feel that Queen Elizabeth in particular is a very admirable lady, then when you bow to her you are expressing your belief in the monarchy and your personal affection for her.
In such an act, much like bowing or curtseying to the Queen, in such an act your body expresses what you feel in your heart and what you believe in your mind.
So how should our body behave before the Tabernacle? If you are a militant atheist or if you hate God then your body will express your heart and mind by refusing to make any act of reverence to Jesus before us in the Blessed Sacrament, in the Tabernacle. We, however, if we have come to Mass, have come here because we are not militant atheists and we do not hate God. If we have come here to Mass, then it is proper that our bodies should express, by genuflecting, by getting down on one knee, to express that we (i) love and respect the Lord Jesus, and that we (ii) believe that Jesus is here in the Tabernacle.
Quite simply, we should genuflect to Jesus because it is a form of worship that we as His creatures owe Him.
To address a couple of simple practicalities: WHEN should we genuflect?
I think that some changes in the rubrics in recent decades have led to some confusion, in that the new rubrics mean that there are now some times when the altar servers DON’T genuflect, and that has confused some people. To help clarify matters I’ve put those quotations in the newsletter, but let me spell it out:
First, ALL of us, unless physically incapacitated, all of us should genuflect to the Tabernacle when we enter the Church before we enter or leave our pew, or when walking across in front of the Tabernacle before or after Mass. “No one who enters a church should fail to adore the blessed sacrament ...at least by genuflecting. Similarly those who pass before the blessed sacrament genuflect.” (Ceremonial (1989) n.71)
Then, for behaviour during the Mass itself: Here I am going to correct what I may have said to some of you previously, and I’m correcting myself on the basis of that recent document I’ve quoted in the newsletter:
We should genuflect on entering the sanctuary and on leaving the sanctuary. This includes readers, and because we use the old pulpit as our lectern that means that our sanctuary actually includes the area leading to the pulpit, so readers should genuflect when they come up to read and when they leave after reading. Similarly, Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers should genuflect on entering and leaving the sanctuary. “If the tabernacle is located on the sanctuary, the celebrant, deacons, servers, lectors etc, genuflect when approaching the altar at the beginning and leaving at the end of a liturgical celebration. But they do not genuflect during the celebration itself. Otherwise, all who pass before the tabernacle genuflect, for example lectors [readers] and extraordinary [Eucharistic] ministers on entering and leaving the sanctuary. Only those who are physically incapacitated should substitute a bow for a genuflection.” (Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite (2004) n.199)
Some of the confusion, I think, stems from the fact that servers, during the Mass but not outside the Mass, are now not to genuflect every time they pass in front of the Tabernacle but only the first time they enter the sanctuary and the last time they leave the sanctuary – this is confusing because people see the servers not genuflect and think that genuflection has somehow been abolished, but it hasn’t been.
I hope I’ve been clear, if not, hopefully re-reading the newsletter entry will help.
But, I want to tell you that genuflecting to Jesus in the Tabernacle is not merely something we should do because we are obliged, but it is also something that is good for us to do, something that benefits us by doing it.
One of the major problems we have in life is that we lose our proper focus, we lose our direction, we get stressed and worried because we're not looking where we should be looking, we don't have that calming and strengthening focus that being focused on the Lord God gives us.
This is one of the very simple but crucial ways that an act of genuflection benefits us. When we genuflect properly, not just casually looking over at somebody else waving hello while giving a kind of mechanical genuflection before the Tabernacle, and not just physically making the genuflection perfect, but making a genuflection where we are thinking of what we are doing and meaning what we are doing: a genuflection where my body is pointed towards the Lord in the Tabernacle and my heart is thinking of the Lord in the Tabernacle and I get down on my knee before Him as an act of loving reference to Him.
For myself, I know that one of the things that makes the biggest difference to my day is how I make my first morning genuflection. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is I come down to this church and I genuflect Jesus in the Tabernacle before I go to kneel and sit and pray. There are times when I genuflect properly and that simple action has a big effect: my prayer is better focused, and my day is more directed and structured. There are other times when I'll finish my first half-hour of morning prayer and realise that the reason my prayer was all distracted was because I didn't make the effort to make the initial genuflection properly focused.
When YOU come into this church how you genuflect will affect how well you are focused during the Mass. As a consequence, how you genuflect will affect how well you are focused on God for the rest of the week. It's a simple thing, but it has huge consequences.
So, when you genuflect look ahead to Jesus in the Tabernacle, when you genuflect do it wholeheartedly so that your knee actually touches the ground, don't do the wiggle thing, and when you genuflect focus your heart and mind in love and reverence to the loving and all-powerful God who is here before you.
And if you get that simple thing right it's a simple thing with big consequences.
Genuflection:
“No one who enters a church should fail to adore the blessed sacrament ...at least by genuflecting. Similarly those who pass before the blessed sacrament genuflect.” (Ceremonial (1989) n.71)
“If the tabernacle is located on the sanctuary, the celebrant, deacons, servers, lectors etc, genuflect when approaching the altar at the beginning and leaving at the end of a liturgical celebration. But they do not genuflect during the celebration itself. Otherwise, all who pass before the tabernacle genuflect, for example lectors [readers] and extraordinary [Eucharistic] ministers on entering and leaving the sanctuary. Only those who are physically incapacitated should substitute a bow for a genuflection.” (Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite (2004) n.199)
I want to try and tell you today that the Trinity is not just an abstract doctrine, is not just a riddle about God being three while also being one, about having three persons but one nature. In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity teaches us something that should give us a warm cosy feeling inside.
Let me make a comparison to you: Let us imagine what our notion of God would be like if we did not know about the Trinity, and let’s compare that with the notion of God that is revealed to us in the Trinity.
If we want to imagine what our notion of God would be like without the Trinity it’s not difficult: we can simply look back in history and see what reasonable men thought God was like before Christianity. In particular, we can look to the ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle and so forth. Because even in ancient times there were men whose reasoning was clear enough that they saw that the pagans idols were fictions, that there are not many gods but only one, that he is not a statue but a spirit. Reason alone, even without the benefit of the supernatural Revelation that comes to us in the Bible and through The tradition of the Church, Reason alone was able to tell those philsophers many true things about God.
For example, they knew that god was one, as I said, that he was spiritual and not material. That he was the First Cause of all things, the Unmoved Mover who ‘moved’ the world into existence. That he always existed and never started to exist. That he had no limits.
But there is one thing that we fail to find in the ancient Greek philosophers, and that is the notion that God is interested in us, that He loves us.
And we also fail to find in the ancient Greeks any notion of God being relational –something he has to be if he is to love.
And what do we find in the doctrine of the Trinity? What do we find in the Revelation of God given to us in Jesus Christ?
We find that love and relationship are the very essence of what God is: “God is love”(1 Jn 4:8) Scripture says.
When we say that in the one God there are three persons, we are saying that in His very being there is an eternal loving inter-relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
When the Church professes that the Son is EQUALLY God, as truly God as the Father is, when the Church solemnly professes, as we say in the Creed, that the Son ALWAYS existed, that though He is begotten of the Father He is “ETERNALLY begotten of the Father, God from God...”, when we say this we are saying that this loving inter-relationship of three persons is what God is.
So, while it is true that this is not an easy thing to grasp, that it will always exceed our mere human intellect’s ability to FULLY comprehend, it is nonetheless a doctrine that teaches us that God is love. It is a doctrine that should give us a warm cosy feeling inside.
I don’t think I’ve ever told you all this, but I once went out for a drink with a witch. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a witch and a priest out together for a drink, it’s not a common sight. But a few years ago I stumbled across an old school friend of mine I’d not seen in 20 years, and we went for a drink. Now, admittedly, you wouldn’t have recognised her as a witch, she’d left her hat and broomstick at home. But she nonetheless attempted to convince me of the pagan art of Wicca: crystals, magic numbers, and star signs. And I explained that at best that was all a lot of baloney, and at worst it is an invitation to the devil to enter your life, and that either way anyone who had been to a Catholic school the way we both had should have known better. I explained that I believed in Jesus instead.
When most of us were growing up, the only place you heard of witches was in fairy tales. But now, much the amazement of many of us, the old pagan superstitions are very much on the rise. Any bookshop will offer you a large range of such occult books and products, even if they fail to provide a single Bible. It’s all a perfect example of G.K. Chesterton’s old saying that: when people stop believing in God, it’s not that they come to believe in nothing, but that they end up believing in ANYTHING.
Modern witchcraft and the occult has a big attraction for many people today, in part, I think, because it offers a type of religion without any commitments, no demands.
We, however, as Catholics, need to be clear that this is not OUR religion, it’s not the truth. And we have to choose between superstition and the one true God.
Faith is in a person: Jesus Christ, not in numbers, stars and dates – Scripture condemns all these – they're all attempts to control God, rather than trust in Him to control things for us.
Jesus is not like superstition – He is rational, sensible, trustworthy. And the Church puts forward rational reasons for us to have faith, reasons like the empty tomb to prove the Resurrection, like the design and order of the cosmos to prove the existence of God.
But what, you might be asking, does this have to do with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which is what we celebrate today? Well, it’s about the type of God that we believe the Holy Spirit to be.
A lot of the New Age books that you’ll find for sale among the New Age ‘Crystals’ will speak of spirits, and even of “The” Spirit. But it’s nothing like the Spirit we believe in. It is not the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
The Spirit that Jesus taught us about, that He promised to send, is not just some vague thing flowing here and there. Yes, the Spirit blows where He wills, but that does not make Him some vague entity. It does not make Him vague, or unsure about what He is, or what He does.
Jesus referred to Him using quite concrete terms: “another helper”, “an Advocate”. The Holy Spirit is a definite person, one of the three persons of the Trinity, and because He is a person He can help you, love you, care for you, strengthen and guide you.
Now, if you are a Satanist explicitly worshipping the Devil, then you too have a ‘personal’ god, albeit a false god.
However, most modern witches don’t claim to worship the Devil, but they do have a problem with prayer, because for them prayer, ultimately, for them, is just navel-gazing, looking inside, stillness: You cannot have a personal encounter with the God within – because it’s just yourself. There is no personal God to pray to.
For a Christian, prayer is a personal ENCOUNTER, with the living Lord. The Holy Spirit does come and dwell INSIDE you, but He is a person distinct from you, who comes from outside of you. An encounter that He promised especially in the sacraments He gave us, like Holy Communion.
My friend, may not fly on a broomstick, but she is a witch nonetheless, and there are many like her. Followers of a restoration of the foolishness of the pagans.
We need to be on guard not to be influenced by their ideas. The Christian God is very different. He is a rational, personal God – the Holy Spirit whose coming we pray for today.
16th May 2010, Ascension Sunday
40 years old! I recently celebrated my 40th birthday. I say ‘celebrated’ with qualification, because being 40 is not really something I’m happy about. In fact, it’s something of a problem.
Strictly speaking, I don’t mind being 40, it’s the things that come with being 40. Now, like many mid-life men, I have sought to fight the decline of my body, and this year I have taken up running, lowered my blood pressure and shed over a stone in weight. But, nonetheless, when I look in the mirror I see bloodshot eyes surrounded by wrinkles that no longer go away with a good night’s sleep, I see hair falling out, and the hair that's left being interspersed with increasing flecks of grey.
There is no denying the fact that my body is not what it used to be.
In fact, it seems to me, that the worst thing about turning 40 is that 50, 60, and the grave, seem increasingly close. And looking at my family history, being 40 is being half-way dead. Some people throw big PARTIES when they reach this milestone, when they become half-dead. I, however, walked down the road to the cemetery and checked that there is space for me in the grave with the other dead priests who have served Shaftesbury.
I am dying. Not in hurry. Probably not any day soon, but I am dying, and this is what is all the clearer to me on turning 40.
But I can say all this with a smile on my face, and I want to share with you a thought about dying. Obviously, especially in a parish where over 5% of the congregation is over 90 (and that’s only those of you who have told me your age), there are many of you who could add a thought or two yourselves. But I want to tell you that the older I have got the more I have come to see death as a “friend”, and a friend TO ME. And today’s feast of the Ascension gives us a very clear reminder of why death is a “friend” –because of the hope of Heaven.
Admittedly, Heaven is a hope not a certainty, because none of us can say for sure whether we will go there. Jesus warned that the way to enter is by “the narrow gate”, along the “hard” path, and that “few” find it (Mt 7:13-14). But, nonetheless, living a life that repeatedly seeks to re-orient itself to that goal, that knows the mercy of God and calls on the mercy of God every time we realise we have fallen, living a life in the hope of heaven is living a life that sees death as a friend.
Let us note for a minute the way that the disciples responded, at an emotional level, to the fact that Jesus had ascended. We might think they would be sad that Jesus had left them. Instead, the Gospel tells us, they were “full of joy”(Lk 24:52)
Because the ascension of Jesus into Heaven was the DEFINITIVE sign that Heaven exists. We know from the Gospels that some of the Jews, the Sadducees, doubted that there was life after death. But the fact that Jesus not only rose from the dead but was ascended, in a bodily manner, into Heaven, is THE sign that Heaven exists as a permanent, bodily, transfigured and glorified place. To know this, to know this with such certainty –it is hardly surprising that they were “full with joy”.
And this must be our joy too. The prayer of the Preface for Mass today says, “where he [the head ] has gone, we hope to follow” – but IS this our hope?
I have said that death is a “friend”. But, some of our friends make us a little uncomfortable. Death can be an uncomfortable friend because he, or she (because St Francis called her “sister” death), can be an uncomfortable friend because she reminds us of where our hope lies. If our hope lies in this world, in possessions, in the beauty of the flesh that blossoms today but fades tomorrow (or, in my case, faded some years ago) –if our hope lies here then death is not the friend but the enemy. But she can BECOME our friend by forcefully re-focussing us on what lasts, on the goal that is a WORTHY goal for living: Heaven.
Growing old is no fun, no “joy”, at least not the physical process of decay – it’s a result of Original Sin.
But if we approach the process of approaching death with faith, remembering, as we heard in our second reading, that “the one who made the promise is faithful” (Heb 10:23), then even a 40th Birthday can be something to give us “joy”.
9th May 2010, Sixth Sunday of Easter
Jn 14:23-29
May is the month of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ. She can seem like a remote figure to some people, she is someone little spoken of in many churches these days, someone little loved. And I know that I myself do not pay her the love, respect and affection she deserves, she who is my Heavenly Mother and always looking out for me.
Yet, the Church gives two months of the year to her: May and October, and so I want to say a few words about her in this month, in particular, about how she exemplifies two of the things Jesus spoke about in that Gospel: peace and fear.
Jesus said, “Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give to you”
And added, “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid”
There are different kinds of ‘being troubled’, different kinds of ‘fear’, and of ‘peace’.
Peace is not just the absence of war. Peace, at its root, is about peace with God, because He is the basis of everything.
If we searched the Scriptures for the perfect example of this we could come to none other than Our Lady. Our Lady had peace because she was without sin, she was ‘full of grace’.
But what of fear? Was she ever afraid?
We know she suffered, and suffered much. She suffered on Calvary, at the foot of the Cross. She suffered at other times, like when she lost the child Jesus in the Temple for three days.
But this does not mean she feared.
To suffer without fear involves being able to trust, and Our Lady trusted.
At the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel told her she was to be the Mother of God, she might well have had reason to fear. Yet the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid’; and shortly after her cousin Elizabeth said of her, ‘Blessed is she who believed the promise made her by the Lord’. Our Lady believed, Our Lady trusted, and Our Lady had no fear – certainly, she did not have fear as we have fear.
At the foot of the Cross, she still trusted in the words that her son had said, when He said that He would rise again, ‘After three days…’ (Mk 8:31)
At Pentecost, Scripture tells us the Apostles were gathered around her in prayer. While they were bereft, she trusted.
What of myself? I do not so easily trust. I try to run my own life; I often say I believe in God, but I behave as if I believed just in myself. Whether it’s in refusing to admit I’ve got a flu bug and need to rest, or refusing to accept that I can’t master the events of my day or the timing of my life.
Who can I turn to, to trust better? No one better than her, Our Lady, Our Heavenly Mother.
Her EXAMPLE can show me how to trust: in the events of life, she held on to the faith, she held on to the promises made by the Lord.
But even more, I can ENTRUST MYSELF TO HER, knowing she is the Mother in heaven that God has assigned to watch over me, and watch over you. Her powerful intercession can grant me the grace to trust more in the Lord, to have more calm and peace in my heart. When she asks, God dispenses. He denies her not in heaven, because she did not deny Him on earth.
The peace that Jesus promised, was manifested in the life of His mother, and if we turn to her, it can be ours too.
2nd May 2010, Fifth Sunday of Easter
Jn 13:31-35
Everyone, I think, knows that Christianity is about ‘love’ but love is often seen as something for the weak, or something vague and meaningless. But if we think of the context in which Jesus told us to ‘love’ we should see that it is neither of these.
Jesus gave His great commandment, ‘love one another’, on the night before He died. As we heard in that passage, it was just after Judas had gone out from the Last Supper to betray Him. His death is intimately connected with His commandment: He said, ‘love one another, as I have loved you’ and He loved us unto DEATH. And this is what His love means.
Some people speak as if love was just a cosy feeling. And the saints of the Church do speak of “affective love” what wells up in our affections, and what we need to foster and encourage within us.
But if love was ONLY a feeling then it wouldn’t be something that would lead us to death.
Love, in what the saints call “effective love”, is a decision of the will. A CHOICE to love someone.
“Effective love” does not mean liking, does not merely mean being attracted to help those I like.
Such love means choosing to act in the best interests of another person, even to act in the best interests of someone I don’t much like.
Jesus said, ‘By this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples’. We might ask ourselves if this holds true for us: would the love we have make others say: ‘That is a follower of Jesus Christ’.
What would such a person look like? One who loved?
He would think of the needs of others before his own
He would he willing to be interrupted in his tasks in order to help someone
He would be patient with people, ‘Love is patient’ (St Paul, 1 Cor 13)
He would be willing to do difficult things, not just easy things
When people look at me, I know they often do not see such things.
They do not see a perfect disciple, a perfect sign of Christ.
And the same might be said of you.
Sometimes when we deal with our family, or friends, or others, we can try to love, but struggle. It is hard to love a child when he is screaming and throwing a tantrum. It is hard to look like the loving Christian who is a sign of Christ.
Are we therefore hypocrites?
Being a Christian is not about being a hypocrite, it’s about aspiring to standard that is above us, above us because it comes from above, from God.
But two final points: if it’s hard to love: WHY love? And HOW can I even attempt it?
In terms of WHY, it must be acknowledge that there are many in our society today who have abandoned even the attempt at loving, abandoned the attempt at LIVING FOR OTHERS: Living for SELF is the explicit goal of many.
But it does not take much analysis to see that this is not a NOBLE way of living, or a worthwhile way of living.
We should love because love is something we see as desirable to be.
But even more fundamentally, we should want to love because Christ FIRST loved us, and chose to die out of love for us.
And that last point also explains HOW I can hope to have the power to love:
Through Him
Jesus Christ called His command to love a ‘new’ commandment, and it is new because we seek to love after His example, and by His power – the power of the resurrected Lord whose grace enables us to do things that by ourselves we cannot!
A command for the tough, not for the weak, but a command that is possible, because of Him.
25th April 2010, Fourth Sunday of Easter
Today, the 4th Sunday of Easter, is Good Shepherd Sunday, when we think about how Christ is ‘The Good Shepherd’, and about how He shepherds us through the Church, through the ministry of priests. However, in recent months the media coverage of priesthood has been dominated by the gross failures of certain priests and by the failure of bishops to adequately deal with those priests, and as a consequence I don't think I could speak about the priesthood without making a reference to this.
If you were here a few weeks ago you would have heard me say how this whole business has been a tragedy, and a tragedy of our own making. I don’t want now repeat what I said then, but if you want the written handout I gave there are still some copies in the porch: http://fatherdylanjames.blogspot.com/2010/03/concerning-popes-letter-on-clergy-abuse.html .
Today, I want to make two simple points to try and re-establish your confidence in the priesthood: that the sacraments continue to shepherd us even when they work through unworthy priests; and, that most priests are not as bad as the media stereotype is painting us.
I know that many of you feel let down by the fact that those priests have behaved in a way so radically opposed to the compassionate shepherding they are supposed to offer. You feel let down, and so do I, and so do the vast majority of priests who feel the taint of this scandal very closely.
But, it is important to note that the number of priests who have been guilty of these offences is a small minority of priests. In fact, the statistics show, as has been carefully researched at the prestigious Stanford and Santa Clara Universities in California, , that Catholic priests are HALF as likely as the rest of the population to behave in this way - even though the media stereotype now associates this abuse specifically with priests. So, if you now look at a priest with suspicion, you should be TWICE as suspicious of any else who is NOT a priest. Or, to phrase that conversely, you should have twice as much confidence in a Catholic priest than you have in anyone else.
In addition, the sexual abuse rate among Catholic priests is no higher than the rate among male non-Catholic clergy. More recently, similar statistics have also been reported in journals like Newsweek.
- and the basic implication of these statistics is that this is not a problem unique to the Catholic Church, in any sense. What IS unique to the Catholic Church is that a much greater degree of trust is betrayed when the person who behaves this way is a priest.
I know that many of you feel even more let down by the behaviour of certain bishops, bishops who have covered up, or at the very least failed to respond, to these cases. You feel let down, and so do I, and so do the vast majority of priests, and, I might point out, so do some good bishops who made many hard decisions to get rid of priests and are now tainted with the same label of inaction that applies to others.
But the basic point that I want to make to you today is that we NEED our priests and bishops.
A holy and GOOD priest is a great thing to behold, and a great gift to his people.
But the things that the priesthood gives us are so important that God has arranged things such that those things come to us even when a priest is mediocre, or even when he is sinful. The base line things that the priesthood gives us are: the sacraments and the teaching of the Church – and these are important because these are how we have union with Christ, these are how we encounter Christ today.
The clearest example of this truth is what we have come here for today: the Mass.
You have not come here to Mass today to see and meet me – at least I hope you haven’t.
You have come here today to meet and encounter Christ. Christ fed the crowds 2000 years ago. And He promised at the Last Supper, the First Mass, that when we “do this in memory of” Him, the bread and wine become what He said of them: His Body, His Blood, His Soul and His Divinity - as food for our souls. The priest, configured to Christ the Head by an indelible mark on his soul at his ordination, the priest follows Christ’s command and what Christ promised comes true: and we encounter Christ.
And this comes true even when the priest is half-hearted, or lazy, or otherwise sinful, the sacramental miracle is so important that FOR THE SAKE OF THE PEOPLE it works even when the priest is lousy.
Of course, in extreme cases like those in the media recently, a priest's unworthiness means that he must be removed from his office. But, in more daily cases of a priest's unworthiness, the shepherding that comes to us in the sacraments is so important that Christ has established His Church in such a way that this shepherding works despite, not necessarily because of, the worthiness of individual priests. Sometimes priests are not worthy – and this is damaging to the Church – that’s why the Eucharistic Prayer of every Mass prays especially for the clergy: because it’s important for everyone that the clergy are holy.
But priests in general are much better than the media reports have been giving the impression that they are.
And even if they weren’t, the shepherding of the sacraments comes to us even so, and it’s a great and wonderful gift that we should thank God for.
11th April 2010, Second Sunday of Easter
Jn 20:19-31
We recall today a person and an event so significant that the name and phrase still lives on even in our post-Christian society: a "doubting Thomas".
Thomas is often criticised as a sceptic, one who refuses to believe. But I suspect myself that he actually more of a cynic – a cynic being someone who has come to believe more in evil and suffering than in good and God.
Suffering and the experience of evil is something that can make us doubt the existence of goodness, and this is cynicism. So that when the cynic hears others talk of goodness, he points to evil and suffering. And I think this is what we see in Thomas: it’s not just that he doubts like a skeptic, but that he positively believes in the negative. What does he refer to when they refer to the resurrection? He speaks of the wounds that killed our Lord, he speaks of the experience of suffering, of disaster, of what has gone wrong.
The Thomas who we heard doubting was not always so cynical. Earlier in the gospel, when Jesus set out for Jerusalem where He faced certain death, Thomas bravely said to the other apostles, "let us also go, that we may die with him" (Jn 11:16).
But by the start of today's gospel passage, this brave disciple had changed dramatically, he had become cynical, and refused to believe. What had happened in between? The Cross. The experience of the suffering of the Cross had shattered his faith. And suffering can destroy our faith too.
Even though suffering is a time when we need our faith the most, to remind us that we are united to our loving Lord on the Cross, of the happiness that awaits us in heaven, of the fact that we have a loving Father who watches over us, even if we cannot see exactly how. Just when we need our faith the most, pain can lead us to doubt these basic truths.
How does our Lord respond to a cynic's doubts?
In response to Thomas's doubts, our Lord showed him His wounds, and He publicly displays them to us too, to show that He has triumphed over them. The same Jesus who hung before us on the Cross, also appeared to show that He had faced and overcome suffering. Thus Jesus says, "In the world you will have tribulation. But be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world" (Jn 16:33).
This is what enables us to have faith even though we live in a world where there is suffering. We know that our God has suffered with us, and for us, and even more, that He has triumphed over it, and promises us a share in His victory, if we but put our faith and trust in Him. That's why St. John says, "this is the victory over the world: our faith" (1 Jn 5:4).
Scripture also reminds us that suffering can TEST our faith (1 Pet 1:3-9), and that it not only tests it, it purifies it. Suffering can lead us to re-examine where we actually put our trust, is it in ourselves and our human strengths, or is it in God alone? Thomas's faith crumbled under the weight of suffering: like the other disciples, his faith had been weak.
But the sight of the risen Lord rebuilt his faith, and it can rebuild and strengthen our faith too. Because even though the experience of suffering is great, the triumphant resurrection of our Lord squarely faces that suffering, and still promises us hope in something even greater.
Every religion, or philosophy must try to deal with the problem of suffering, but none can do so as well as Christianity. The cross and suffering are unique to our faith alone. In the creed we say, "We believe" that Christ suffered, was crucified and died. We do not say that we believe we live in a perfect world with no pain. But greater still is our statement of faith in the resurrection and Christ's triumph over death and suffering.
When our faith is tested by suffering, as it easily can be, when we feel like giving in to cynicism, we would do well to recall the sight of our Lord showing his triumphant wounds, a display that gives faith in him credibility even in a world of tribulation.
Jn 20:1-9; Acts 10:34-43
Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. I want today to say a few words about an aspect of the relationship between the seeing and believing.
We just heard the account where it records how St John, the beloved disciple, went into the empty tomb, “He saw and he believed” (Jn 20:8). What he saw enabled him to believe.
Now I am a scientist by background: I got a degree in mathematical physics before I finally responded to my vocation and went off to train to be a priest. And I still largely look at the world as a scientist: a scientist deals primarily with what he sees, with what he can measure, and with the repeatable testable phenomena that he can analyse to compare theory with measured fact. For a scientist, the phrase “He saw and he believed” can seem quite scientific.
But what I have gradually come to realise, at a deeper and deeper level, is that there are many truths that I don't know because I myself have seen them and measured them, but they are true even though I myself have not seen them and have not measured them. This sort of truth I have to know by a different process: I have to know it by trusting the testimony of another witness.
For example, when I was talking to my sister on the phone she told me that my niece can walk now, but I had not seen this myself, I only knew this because I trust the testimony of my sister. And it would be a foolish sort of narrow-mindedness that said I would only believe things that I have seen myself - I would end up not knowing many truths that I otherwise could know.
The truths that we know by faith we know on the evidence of witnesses. None of us here have met, heard, and eaten with Jesus in the manner that we heard Peter, in our first reading, telling the people how he and those who were with him had "eaten and drunk with [Jesus] after his resurrection from the dead" (Acts 10:41). But to accept the evidence of reliable witnesses, reliable witnesses with written records of what those witnesses saw, who saw it, and when they saw it -to accept the evidence of such witnesses is a reasonable thing to do, a reasonable way to know these truths.
But to know these truths we have to acknowledge that there ARE truths beyond what we have seen for ourselves. Actually, this is what we see in St John, the one who "he saw and he believed". As I said, he went into the empty tomb, saw, and believed.
But I want to make a VERY important point to you: What was it that he saw? What was it that he saw that enabled him to believe? Did he see a choir of angels? No. Did he see a blinding light? No. Did he see a dead body come back to life? No. And hadn’t yet seen Jesus in His resurrected state either.
What did he see? All he saw was an empty tomb. And yet, because he approached what he saw with the right attitude, the sight of that empty tomb enabled him to "see" much more than he physically saw before him. Before he saw the empty tomb he neither realised that Jesus had risen from the dead nor realised that Jesus was going to rise from the dead. As this passage and others make clear: neither the women who first went to the tomb, nor those that went after them, were expecting the resurrection. “Till that moment they had failed to understand the teaching of Scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (Jn 20:9).
But, because St John approached that reality open to the truth, once he did see the empty tomb he saw much more: he saw the truth that Christ had risen from the dead. And of course, as we know from other passages, he and others met the resurrected Jesus shortly after this account.
Now, for ourselves, St John gives us a good role model: to be open to the truth in such a way that we know more than is immediately before our eyes. If we approach our lives with the eyes of faith, then in our daily living we too will see more than is immediately before our eyes: we will see the truth of the Lord's presence, we will feel the guiding of His hand, and know the strength of His grace, but only if we look at things as St John looked at things, as “he saw and he believed”.
I’ve mentioned a different unusual, if not odd, thing in each of the last two days’ Triduum liturgies. Tonight I want to refer to a 3rd unusual thing: the phrase, “O Happy Fault”, the “Felix culpa” I sang of in the Exultet.
The Exultet then went on to describe this “happy fault” as the “necessary sin of Adam”. And this might seem even more confusing: In what sense could any sin possibly have been ‘necessary’?
Before saying any more I should note that this is the language of poetry and exclamation rather than the language of strict precise theology but nonetheless it conveys a deep truth.
In what sense was that sin of Adam ‘necessary’?
It wasn’t logically necessary, it did not NEED to happen, and Adam and Eve did not need to do it: Our First Parents, named amidst the symbolism of Genesis as ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’, were free not to commit that first sin, that Original Sin. If they were not free to not commit this sin then there would have been no need for the Devil to tempt them, and there would have been no meaningful way to speak of it as a ‘sin’.
It was necessary in another sense: It was needed IF we were to have “so great a Redeemer”. It could well have not happened, they could well have not sinned. But if Adam had not sinned, there would have been no need for the great event of the Redemption.
If there had been no sin, there would have been no need for the death and resurrection of Christ, there would have been no glorious CELEBRATION of His victory, the victory we recall at Easter.
I follow the school of theology that argues that Christ would have come anyway: He would have come as one of us even if there had been no sin to efface – He would have come to COMPLETE our human nature, our human nature that longed to be fulfilled by union with the Divine, the union that occurred in Christ’s own person when He as a Divine person added a human nature to the Divine nature He already possessed.
But if there had been no sin then this union with God would not be wrapped up in the glory of victory.
To take a somewhat loose comparison: consider a captain who has glory simply in being captain of a great company of soldiers, and consider the glory his soldiers have simply from being part of such a great company with such a great captain. Now, compare him with that same captain if he has the additional glory of victory in a battle. Such a victory only comes at a cost, and it only comes because there was some enemy that arose that needed to be conquered. Both of these (the cost and the enemy) are not desirable things but the greater glory achieved is because of the “happy fault”. And his company share in that glory, in the benefit that was accrued from that “happy fault”.
The “happy fault” of that Original Sin of Adam was indeed a fault, was indeed an evil. It was an offense against the all-good God who had showered such blessings on our First Parents. It was an act of disorder and disharmony that skewered the order of the whole of material creation causing the disorder that we see all around us, a disorder such that “all creation groans in eager longing” (Rom 8:19) to be set free from its bondage to decay. It brought suffering to a world that had not known suffering. It was an offence that cast our First parents out of the harmony of Eden and exiled them to a land where they and their descendents merited damnation.
It was truly a “fault”.
But it is a “happy” fault because God drew out of that evil an even greater good. As St Thomas Aquinas teaches, this stands as the definitive example of how “God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom”(ST III q1 a3 ad3). That “fault” is “happy” because the act of Redemption has given us an even more beautiful and inspiring sign of His LOVE for us: His death on the Cross. It is a “happy” fault because it has displayed an even greater degree of the Lord’s GLORY by His victory over sin and death in the resurrection. And it is a “happy” fault because we SHARE in that victory by our union with Christ. By being incorporated, by grace, into the Mystical Body of Christ we share in the glory of the Head – we gain more from this than He did!
And thus we can sing, “O Happy Fault!”
We may well have some people here are unfamilar with the Good Friday liturgy, and if you're not a regular here you are very welcome. But you will see us do something today that might seem very odd: you will see us kneel down before an image of a dead man, and you will see us kiss the instrument of his death.
I say this for the benefit of our regular Catholics because it is important that we too remember how unusual what we are doing is. Similarly, someone might ask, why do you have an image of a dead man hanging in your church? Why do you have an image of that same dead man hanging on the walls of your homes?
We do not do this because we are morbid. We do not do this because we have some bizarre fascination with death. We do this as an act of love, devotion, and gratitude to the man who died, and also because He was not just any man, in fact, He was not just a man –He was and is God.
We in England are not accustomed to outward displays of affection, or outward displays of devotion. We often laugh about overly-demonstrative Italians, or Americans. But even Englishmen show SOME acts of affection, and that particular type of affection that is called “devotion” is what gathers us here today.
We gather here to honour Christ, Christ who died on the Cross for us.
But even today, when we focus on His death, it is important to remember that if He was STILL dead we would not be here at all today. It is because He ROSE from the dead, because He actually showed Himself to be what He claimed – namely God Himself, it is because He is all-powerful that His death is of such significance for us. It is because He is all-powerful that we look back to His death and see what a free act it was on His part, that we see that it was something that He chose to do for us, that we see that it was an act of love for us, that we see that it was the sacrifice that takes our sins away, that reconciles us back to God.
So, when we see that image of a dead man on the Cross, we are recalling that He was not just a man, He was and is God. And we are recalling that the Cross was not some random disaster but rather was the culmination of a long-foretold plan of the Almighty, a plan to save us from our sins.
And recalling that should awaken a response from us, should awaken affection.
The affection that the Cross should awaken in us should be the type of glad, joyful affection that arises from gratitude.
If we think of how often we feel gratitude to people for much smaller and mundane things, surely, the gratitude we should feel for someone dying for us should be much greater.
Of course, it’s possible to not feel gratitude at all. We all know the annoying feeling of someone ignoring the good we have done for them. And surely Our Lord feels the same: the many apparitions of the Sacred Heart have told the saints, and through them have told us, that He who once walked among us with a real human heart with real human emotions, He still has that human heart, even in His risen and glorified state, and He feels affections for us, and He feels our lack of affection for Him, our lack of gratitude. As He put it in His apparition to St Margaret Mary, “Behold this heart that has so loved men, and yet been repaid with such ingratitude and coldness”.
Gratitude, then we have gratitude, gratitude inspires love. And love inspires works of devotion, and devotion expresses itself in signs, signs of affection.
When we genuflect before the Cross, when we kiss the image of the crucifix, we are outwardly expressing our devotion.
And such acts of devotion do not just express the devotion we already have, they help foster and build it up.
So, as we do this today, let us ask the Lord to increase our love for Him, to increase our awareness of what He has done for us in dying for us, because, as St Paul put it so long ago, this is what proves that He loves us: that He died for us, while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8).
1st April 2010,
Maundy Thursday
There are a number of unusual things that we do as a part of the Triduum liturgy over these three days -things that are unusual, yet have always felt right to me as I grew up with the liturgy. One of those things in the procession at the end of tonight’s liturgy, when we remove the Blessed sacrament from the tabernacle and take Him to another place: the altar of repose.
This feels right when we return tomorrow on Good Friday, because the world that stands empty at the death of Christ is mirrored in the church’s emptiness of the tabernacle.
But even more than this, the symbolism seems right in that tonight is about Jesus leaving us, Jesus leaving us to go and die, Jesus leaving us to go from the comfort and intimacy of the Last Supper and the Upper Room to go to the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Tonight's liturgy is very much about Jesus leaving us, and so it is only suitable that the liturgy should end with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament leaving the tabernacle. And it is only suitable that the liturgical tradition calls on us to "watch" in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, "watch" in prayer as the apostles were called on to watch in prayer in the Agony in the Garden.
Tonight's liturgy, as we focus on Jesus leaving us, reminds us of what Jesus left us to remain with us when He was gone, and each of the three things that tonight’s liturgy focuses on is a different aspect of the gifts He left us "to reveal His love", as the opening prayer tonight's Mass said.
There were three things He gave His apostles at the Last Supper: the Mass, the Priesthood, and the New Commandment.
The first of those gifts, namely the Mass, was itself a twofold gift. In one aspect it is the gift of His Presence: His Body and Blood, His Soul and Divinity, present in the Blessed Sacrament, present to be the food for our souls. While the other aspect of that twofold gift of the Mass was the gift to us of the perfect prayer, namely the sacrifice of the Mass. In both of these aspects His gift was that He was to remain with His Church even as He was leaving it.
The second of those gifts, the Priesthood, is the automatic corollary of the gift of the Mass. If the Mass is to be a gift from Christ to us, then it must be a gift that is received, not something that we make ourselves - and the fact that the priesthood is received from another priest from another priest who received it from a priest who ultimately received from an Apostle who received it from Christ - this is the guarantee that the Mass is our gift from Christ, and not merely our own invention. The Priesthood is a very particular form of Christ remaining with His Church.
The third and last of those gifts, the New Commandment, was given at the Last Supper: “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another as I have loved you”(Jn 13:34) – not merely to love, but to love as He has loved us. And while these words are not in tonight’s liturgy, they are expressed in the loving humility of the foot-washing that is in tonight’s gospel and is re-enacted in the ritual tonight. They are expressed also in the fact that the liturgy specifies that gifts for the poor are to be brought up in the offertory procession of this night - and tonight the SVP will be bringing forward offerings of clothing of the homeless.
These three things are the pivotal ways in which Christ remains with us: in the love of the New Commandment; in the Priesthood that gives us the Mass; and in the Mass itself. Christ left this threefold gift that night. And He went from the Upper Room to the Cross, to the Cross, to the death that was itself that threefold act of love, of Priesthood, of the Mass. As we think of how He left that room to go to the Garden, let us in our hearts and minds accompany Him, and recall what He left us when He went.
28th March 2010, Passion Sunday
Lk 22:14-23:56
Last year I told you how my little nephew asked me why Jesus rose from the dead. Not to be outdone, some time afterwards, his younger brother asked me a similarly profound question about the crucifixion. I was sat at home, in my bedroom, reading my Bible, while little Ethan, at the age of 3½ was asking me questions about various things on my shelf. And he brought me a crucifix, and he asked me, "Uncle Dylan, why did they do that to him?" I guess my answer wasn't very satisfying, because a few minutes later he brought me another crucifix, and again asked me, "Uncle Dylan, why did they do that to him?"
The simple answer to this question is: they did “that” to Him because they hated Him. They brought Him to Pilate, demanded that Pilate crucify him, they mocked, insulted, beat him, and spat on him – because they hated Him.
And why did they hate Him? As we just heard how Pilate asked, “Why? What evil has He done? I have found Him guilty of no crime.” (Lk 23:22). As we’ll sing on Good Friday,“Why? What has my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? He made the lame to see, He gave the blind their sight.”
The central core of the reason that they hated Him was clearly expressed in His trial before the Sanhedrin, as we heard in that reading of the Passion. We know from other passages in the Gospels that the chief priests and Pharisees were jealous of Jesus because of the huge crowds flocked to Him, that they argued with Him because His teaching fulfilled the Law of Moses in a way that contradicted their own interpretation of the Law, and we know that they had contempt for Him because He was of humble origins - a Galilean, from the country.
However, there was more to Jesus than the description of those simple facts conveys: there was something about Jesus that demanded a reaction from the people who encountered Him: sinners repented, sickness was driven out, demons were exorcised, fishermen left their boats and nets by the shore of the sea to follow Him, crowds flocked to hear Him teach.
But, the reaction to Jesus was not always positive: the Gospels also record times when the crowd left Him because they did not accept His teaching, because they said "this is a hard teaching” (Jn 6:60). There was one ‘hard teaching’ in particular that demanded a reaction either in favour of Him or against Him: His claim to be "the Christ", "the Son of God", to be the Lord God Himself: the great “I AM” (Lk 22:70 c.f. Exodus 3:14). Every other claim He made was rooted in this ‘hard teaching’. This demanded a reaction; and this caused the reaction that led to His crucifixion.
The reaction that led to His death is, on a deeper level, the either-or reaction this is demanded of each one of us in our encounter with the Lord God. When we encounter the Lord either in prayer, or in the needs of our neighbour, or in the minute by minute moral demand that we live not in selfish mediocrity but live a life worthy of God and offered to God: when we encounter the Lord we either love Him or we reject Him in sin. And so the rejection of Christ on the cross is the perpetual sign of the rejection that each of us daily make of Him in our sins.
And this, paradoxically, is why the cross is OUR salvation and not only the salvation of the Jews. Because Jesus died because of MY sins, and particularly because He CHOSE to die for my sins, because He chose to enter this world and submit Himself to death for our sakes: because He died for MY sins He thus died as an act of love for me, to save me.
So, when my nephew gets older he will hopefully mature his question from, “Why did THEY do that to him?", to, “Why did WE do that to Him?”, to, “Why did I do that to Him?” And He will know that the shame we might otherwise feel from having done this to Him is taken away by acknowledging what we have done:
like the thief on the cross who became “the Good Thief” by turning to the Lord, admitting His guilt, and receiving the promise: "today you will be with me in Paradise" (Lk 23:43).
21st March 2010, The Fifth Sunday in Lent
Jn 8: 1-11
You’ll sometimes hear non-Catholics say that forgiveness is too easy for us Catholics: we just go to the priest, confess, and we’re forgiven – the implication is that we don’t really need to be sorry. Conversely, as a priest I sometimes come across people who don't believe they CAN be forgiven – and they don’t believe it because it seems too easy. Part of the answer to both of these is to note what TRUE sorrow, true ‘contrition’, really involves, and that’s what I want to say a bit about today. Because solemn Church teaching very clearly lays out what is involved in true sorrow, defined especially at the Council of Trent.
Firstly, being sorry means realising that there is something be need to be sorry for, recognising that we have sinned. And true sorrow, when we recognise our sin, true sorrow responds with hatred of that sin. Hatred because we recognise that the sin is ugly, or, more perfectly: hatred of sin because we recognise that sin offends our loving God.
Hatred of our sin means that we don’t want to keep sinning. Thus contrition, true sorrow, also involves what the Church calls a “firm purpose of amendment” – we have to intend to change. If someone does not intend to change then they are not truly sorry. We have this expressed in today’s Gospel, when Our lord did not simply forgive the woman caught in adultery but said to her, “Go and sin no more”(Jn 8:11).
This includes the resolution to remove oneself from those temptations we call "occasions of sin".
The Church also teaches us that contrition involves the desire and intention to confess our sins. Thinking back to last’s week’s Gospel again, we heard an example of this in the Prodigal son, not only planning what he needed to confess, but then confessing. Wanting to be forgiven, being sorry for our sins, involves the intention to come to the sacrament of forgiveness in Confession.
Lastly, I want to mention an aspect of true sorrow that is often neglected, and I think it is because it is so often neglected that people often think that forgiveness seems too cheap, too cheap to be REAL - when we realise what this aspect costs we perhaps better realise that forgiveness is true:
The last aspect of true sorrow is the desire to make “satisfaction” for our sins. To take a simple example of the need for satisfaction: if a child breaks a jug of milk in a tantrum; the mother might then say she forgives the child; but the milk and broken jug still need to be cleaned up. ‘Satisfaction’ is the remedying of the effects of our sin, even though the guilt of the sin is forgiven. For us as Christians, the “eternal” satisfaction for our sins was paid by Christ on the cross. But there is still what is called the "temporal satisfaction" that we each need to pay for us our sins – and this varies with every sin, but if we do not intend to make such satisfaction than we are NOT sorry. For example, if a thief says that he is sorry but does not intend to return what he has stolen, then his sorrow is not real. In the Gospel we have the example of the tax collector Zaccheus (Lk 19) who when he converted to Jesus said that he would repay all the people he had cheated of their money – such is true sorrow. Similarly, but in less direct ways, an adulterer must want to make amends to his or her spouse. And, for each of our sins we must want to make amends, and this is what true sorrow means, and this is what true forgiveness depends on.
Sometimes this takes a long time, years, to make amends for our sins, but true sorrow WANTS to make up the wrong we have done to others – is HAPPY doing it, knowing that the Father accepts the sinner back.
My last part of this last point is that this satisfaction also includes the need to make satisfaction to God – because we have offended HIM by sinning. When we do works of penance and self-denial, when we offer little sacrifices, these are some of the ways we seek to make satisfaction to Him. And now, during Lent, our Lenten prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, are all called “expressions” of contrition (CCC 1434).
Back to where I began: people often don’t believe in forgiveness because it seems too easy, and it seems too easy because people often don’t realise what true sorrow entails. Knowing what it entails helps us know that it is real. It entails: hatred for the sin we have committed, resolution not to do the sin again, resolution to avoid the occasions that lead us near that sin, it entails the desire to be reconciled by confessing our sins, and lastly, the desire to make up the damage of our sins, to make “satisfaction”.
A summary of these points is found on this week’s newsletter as follows:
True Sorrow
Today’s Gospel reminds us that true contrition (sorrow) involves more than just words, it involves:
• Detestation of the sins we have committed;
• The resolution not to sin again, what is called a “firm purpose of amendment”. This is why Jesus not only forgave the woman caught in adultery but told her to “Go and sin no more” (Jn 8:11);
• The resolution to avoid “occasions of sin” (as part of a firm purpose of amendment);
• The resolution to be reconciled to God by confessing our sins in the Sacrament of Confession;
• The resolution to make “satisfaction” for our sins. For example, a thief who does not intend to pay back what he has stolen is not truly sorry, thus, as St Augustine says, “The sin is not forgiven unless what has been taken away is restored”. In the Gospels, the tax collector Zacchaeus demonstrated this when he said that he would repay all the people he had cheated of money (Lk 19). The type of satisfaction we need to do for our sins depends on the sin: satisfaction to a spouse you have been impatient to will be less specific than repaying stolen money, but true sorrow still seeks to make satisfaction to those we have offended.
To read more please look at the Catechism of the Council of Trent www.catecheticsonline.com/Trent-Index.php and search “Sacrament of Penance”.
14th March 2010, The Fourth Sunday in Lent
Lk 15:1-32
We’ve just heard the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son – a familiar text, even in our secular world.
I want to focus on simple question: WHO is the prodigal son?
For some of you, you may think of your children –maybe who have left home, or left the Faith. In that context, the Gospel reminds us of our need to be ready to welcome them back
But, at its simplest and most profound level, for EACH of us, the question of WHO the prodigal son is: The prodigal son is ME, and it is YOU. And the Gospel is about our Heavenly Father’s desire to welcome us home
The prodigal son needed to go home, But there are many different things that PREVENT us going home.
For many in the secular world outside, they are prevented by not knowing the simple fact that they are AWAY from home, because they do not know the Father and the Father’s heavenly home, because they do not know the beauty of heaven, because they do not know that life has a deeper purpose than feeding self on husks of swine.
For many others outside, they are prevented by not knowing that they are in sin, prevented by the fact that they deny that what they are doing is wrong, prevented from coming home by the fact that they deny that they are away from the Father’s house.
For still others in the world outside, they are prevented by a combination that results in despair: In that cynicism in which there seems no hope of lifting self out of mire -not knowing that the Father DESIRES them to return, makes POSSIBLE their return, gives GRACE and Strength to return, despite repeated failures.
But what of ourselves? How do we grade according to those three tests I mentioned?
Do we presume that we are already home? –because I know it’s easy for me to relax into my life, to falsely presume.
Do we presume that we are not ourselves blind to our own sin? –the longer I’ve lived the more I’ve seen sins in my life that I was blind to in the past, which raises the question of which sins in my life TODAY I fail to see.
And, we might not think that we despair, but if we are comfortable in our own mediocrity, content to not love God more, then that is a form of despair.
As Christians, we might well say that we are both away from the Father’s home and at home.
To come home more fully, we need to realise all the ways that we are away from home, we need to look at our lives honestly, and realise that our lives are not yet as God would have us live them.
When Jesus told us how we should live, He told us we should be perfect: He did not say, ‘Be mediocre as your heavenly Father is mediocre’, or, ‘Be good enough as your heavenly Father is good enough’. No. He said, ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt 5: 48).
To be perfect, means to love perfectly, to be alive and sensitive to the needs and concerns of our family, our neighbour.
Sacramentally, the most pivotal realisation of our returning home to God is going to Confession. We’ll soon have our parish Lenten penitential service. In the sacrament of Confession Jesus has given us the MEANS to return to Him, via His Church, to hear His words of forgiveness.
The Gospel of the Prodigal Son is a reminder to each of us not only that we NEED to come home to the Father, but that we CAN go home to the Father, that He is ready to welcome us, that He is calling us, and that His grace is strengthening is – if we will but use it.
7th March 2010, The Third Sunday in Lent
Lk 13:1-9; 1 Cor 10:1-12; Ex 3:1-15.
Sometimes Jesus says nice comforting things; sometimes harsh and worrying things. Sometimes we hear Him say things like, “Come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28); but sometimes this same Jesus says things like the harsh words in today’s Gospel, “Repent, or you will perish”.
Because we Christians believe that God loves us, we can sometimes forget that God has also threatened to punish us. In addition to the Gospel we just heard a frightening passage from St Paul in which he described how the Israelites "failed to please God and their CORPSES littered the desert", he adds: these things happened as "a warning to us".
Jesus Himself is no less alarming in His words to us. He refers to two tragedies, and says, "but unless you repent you will all perish as they did", and soon REPEATS, "but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did".
Now, I am not repeating this passage to you just to frighten you; and the Church does not give us these readings just to frighten us. And Christ did not warn us just to frighten us.
The same Jesus who sometimes said what seemed easy things at other times said tough things because BOTH types of things were an expression of His love for us and for the people He was originally speaking to.
When a mother or father warns a child that if they put their hand in the fire they are going to get burnt the parent is not saying this out of some twisted desire to worry and panic the child –rather, the parents is saying this because the parent knows the very real danger that the child is in, even though the child does not know or understand the danger that the child is in.
The people that Jesus was talking to didn’t think they were in danger: They thought that they were saved; they thought that as the Jews, the Chosen People, they had nothing to worry about. But Jesus told them that they did indeed have something to worry about because their lives were not bearing fruit. Like the fig tree in that parable, unless they started to bear fruit they would be cut down and thrown on the fire; God would wait a bit longer, but eventually time runs out for each of us and the question will be: did you bear fruit?
God does not force salvation on any of us: He has made us free; He has made us capable of rejecting Him by our indifference to His love.
Jesus warns us because He knows that it is easy for us to fool ourselves, just as the people who He was talking to had fooled themselves. We can fool ourselves that none of this applies to me: I don’t sin, God wouldn’t punish ME. But Scripture says it does apply to me: “If we say we have not sinned, we make God out to be liar, and the truth is not in us”(1 Jn 1:8-10).
Bishop Christopher reminds us of the need to go to confession during Lent. It’s a much needed part of a repentance and forgiveness. As he said in one of his Lenten pastoral letters, "Judging from the very small number of people who present themselves for reconciliation, many of us need to do a truth assessment about ourselves as a matter of some urgency"(Lent 1998).
(pause) God warns us because He cares for us. In fact, we could say that this is the foundational theme of this week’s readings. Right through the Bible, from the garden of Eden to the apocalypse, any warning from God is ALWAYS preceded by a revelation of God's love and care.
A care shown in today's readings in the way that the Lord sought to rescue His people from Egypt: He said to Moses, "I have seen the miserable state of my people... I mean to deliver them... to a land flowing in milk and honey". A care shown in the parable of the fig tree, where the gardener gives the tree another year to try and produce fruit.
The warnings only come because, despite the repeated displays of God's affection for us, we fail to respond.
One of the ways a response can be awakened in us, is the warnings we find today. A kind of SHOCK treatment. But we must remember that the only purpose of the shock is to remind us that Jesus came to SAVE us from perishing, a salvation that He offers to all of us, IF only we would turn to Him. If we always keep in mind that the Lord is rich in mercy, full of compassion, that He has already shown His patience with us, then we will not find it too hard to do what He asks, to look at the lack of fruit we have produced, and respond to Him with love and repentance. Let the prayer of publican be ours: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner”(Lk 18:13).
28th February 2010, The Second Sunday in Lent
Lk 9:28-36; Gen 15:5-18; Phil 3:17-4:1
I want to say a word today about faith and hope can help us when we are struggling, as seen in Transfiguration.
In order for our religion to enable us to keep going when we are struggling there are at least two very particular things we need: we need the faith to believe that God still has a plan for us even in the midst of our difficulties, and we need the hope to set our will towards a goal that it is possible to achieve. The Transfiguration is about giving us both of these things.
The gospel record of the Transfiguration is of an event that happened at the very particular stage in Jesus’s mission: for three years He had travelled, preaching, teaching, healing the sick, working miracles. And He had attracted many followers, but, He had also made many enemies, and He knew that things were heading for a climax. The Gospels tell us that “He set His face for Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51), He set His face towards the death that He must accomplish and humanity’s salvation. He knew the distress that would come to His disciples when He would be captured and crucified, and so He wanted to strengthen them for this trial. He had just predicted to His disciples that He would suffer and die (Lk 9:22), He had warned them that if they would follow Him they must daily take up their cross (Lk 9: 23), and He Transfigured Himself in glory for them just before the Gospel says that “He set His face for Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51). This is what the Transfiguration was and is about.
There is a particular gift of faith that we need when we are in difficulty: we need is to believe that God still has a plan even when, in the midst of our difficulties, it seems that He does not. In the Transfiguration Jesus was manifested talking to Moses and Elijah “speaking of His passion which He was to accomplish in Jerusalem” (Lk 9:31). This public “speaking” of it was clearly for a purpose: to show that the apparent disaster of His passion was part of His plan. Jesus showed them that He had a plan so that they would have an opportunity to hold onto their faith when that suffering came.
But for us, this showing that He had a plan has an additional purpose: to enable us to see the clearest possible example of how God can be working even in the midst of suffering. This means that for us we should be able to believe that God has a plan for us even when we are suffering. And this is precisely what we need to still believe, this is exactly the specific gift of faith that we need when we are suffering. We need to see this example, in the life of God’s own Son, of the teaching that we read in Romans 8:28: “All things for the good for those who love the Lord”.
But in addition to faith we need hope: we need to have our eyes set on a better future; this is also what the Transfiguration gives us. In Christ Himself the Transfiguration showed Him in glory, the glory that will belong to His disciples if they are faithful to Him. This is the hope that should keep us going. We need to not only believe that God has a plan for us but to SEE in faith the vision of what this goal is that we should be striving to; and if we see it we can then “set [our] face” towards the goal we must pursue. Jesus “set His face for Jerusalem”, for the Cross as the means to His triumph and glory, which is also our triumph. We each have different crosses that we must “set [our] face” towards. Maybe the cross of our Lenten penance, maybe the cross of bearing the sufferings in our lives with patience, maybe the cross of living the life of Christian love when it’s hard to keep loving and giving.
Whatever our particular cross, the goal of heaven should spur us on, and the sight of His glorious Transfigured body on that mountain should encourage us and give us hope to set ourselves on. As we just heard the promise in Phil 3:20, “For us, our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the saviour we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ, and He will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of His glorious body. He will do that by the same power with which He can subdue the whole universe”; the same power He manifested on the mountain; the same power He showed forth at His resurrection.
Our faith teaches us that there will be a GREATER glory for us in heaven as a consequence of our sharing in this cross on earth, as a consequence of bearing it patiently and charitably, as a consequence of offering it up as a prayer for others, as a consequence of continuing to struggle to be loving and kind to others even when it is hard, as a consequence of enduring with our Lenten resolutions.
This is the faith and hope we need in our difficulty; the faith and hope manifested in His Transfiguration. If we know this as the GRAND ultimate level, after death, it can help us believe that it also holds in the short term: God has a plan, He is working it out, and there is a better future than the present, IF we work with Him. Glory lay for Him beyond the cross, and it lies beyond for us too.
21st February 2010, The First Sunday in Lent
Lk 4:1-13; Deut 26:4-10
This Lent I’m giving up alcohol, chocolate, snacks, sugar in my tea, and much of my favourite television.
You might think this will make Lent gloomy and miserable, but the Church actually calls Lent “joyful”: the phrase in the first of the Lenten Preface prayers calls Lent, “This joyful season”. I want to say why.
But before I say why, I want to remind you that Lent is a time to ‘give something up’. There is a rather vague notion in circulation that says, “Well, I’m just going to do something POSITIVE instead” – but this notion is not in the ancient saints who first wrote about Lent, it is not in the saints down the ages, and is not in the teachings of the Church today. Now, it is true, prayer and fasting should lead us to be better people with more love, doing ‘positive’ things, so ‘prayer, fasting, and alms-giving’ go together.
But it is a mistake to think that you can bypass the prayer and fasting, bypass the ‘giving things up for Lent’ – we NEED the discipline and self-denial of Lent if we are to ever become good and ‘positive’. And it’s important for children to learn this from a young age. Lent is about going into the desert with Jesus to fast and pray as He did for 40 days - but, this does not make it miserable.
So, being miserable. I’ll admit that when I give up something for Lent I do have a certain type of sadness: already in these last few days, I have had moments when it was my normal time for a snack, I remembered that it was Lent, and I thought, "but I WANT a chocolate cake!”.
But there is a benefit to feeling that type of sadness, and one of the benefits is that it focuses me on what can give me a much truer form of "joy”.
One of the reasons that I am sad about not eating that chocolate cake is that there is a little voice that is saying to me, "the only pleasure that exists is the pleasure you can have right now, is the pleasure in that rich, mouth-watering, chocolate muffin".
But that little voice is lying to me, just as the devil lied when he tempted Jesus in the desert.
The truth is that the greatest pleasures are not those of this world but are the joys that call to us from the next.
So, one of the reasons that Lent is a "joyful season" is that the fasting, discipline, the giving-things-up for Lent –all of this reminds us and focuses us on the truth that our true happiness lies beyond.
Our first reading included the ‘creed’ of the Jewish people, “a wandering Aramaean was my father...”: recalled how God had chosen them, rescued them from Egypt, and brought them to a Promised Land.
Lent can give us joy if it helps us remember the "promised land" of heaven that awaits those who do not spend this life living as if there was no hereafter.
Another reason why giving things up for Lent should be an act of joy is that it should be an act of love, an act that unites us to the loving Lord who suffered and died for us, who ‘gave things up’ for us –on the Cross and in the desert fasting.
There is a something that follows on from this, Let me make a comparison: there are many goodhearted unbelievers who choose to give things up for Lent - I hear people on the radio say such things, and I meet strangers around town who say such things. But for such people, without faith, it is just self discipline – without asking the help and grace of Jesus, without the strength of Jesus. And this means that it is much more hard work - to do this alone.
In contrast, if I have faith, then when I give things up for Lent I do so WITH Jesus and WITH His help. So when I want that snack or glass of wine I can pray, “Jesus, the cake that is not here in front of me, but I would normally rather like to have in front of me, this cake that is not here: I offer it to you”.
By transforming that act of self discipline to an act of fasting, an act of prayer, I then have Jesus to help me.
In summary: giving things up for Lent is our share in Christ’s 40 days in the desert, it helps us grow in the self-discipline that the self-denial of fasting gives us, it helps us detach ourselves from the pleasures of this world and orient ourselves in faith to the joys of the next. And in doing all this WITH our loving Lord, it should be a season of joy.
14th February 2010, The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jer 17:5-8; 1 Cor 15:12-20; Lk 6:17-26.
Recently it seems that I am being frequently reminded of the fact that I'm not as young as I used to be. A while ago I met up with some old school friends, and the talk turned to their various pension plans. We never used to talk about pensions when we went to the pub for a pint! It turned out that I was the only one who hadn't given serious thought to the level of my retirement income.
And it occurred to me that there was something rather ironic about that fact. All my school friends are atheists, and thinking a little further ahead still in life, I realised that I was probably the only one who had started to arrange my plans for what I'd be hoping to do when I'd passed to the great beyond and was no longer able to claim my pension.
Today's readings all point us towards the futility of trusting in material goods, whether they are solid houses or future pensions. Jesus says, "Alas you rich... alas you who have your fill now", and Jeremiah says, "A curse on the man who relies on things of the flesh".
It's very easy for us to put our trust in possessions, especially when we have them. But you don't need to be a Christian to see that worldly fortune can be very changeable, and that ultimately the things of this world do not last. We cannot put our trust in them.
The only one we can trust is the Lord Our God, and we can trust him because of the promises He has made to us, ultimately, the promise of heaven. The most solid sign of that promise is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Saint Paul was writing to the Corinthians because it seems that they had stopped believing that it was possible for life to go on after death, it seems that pagan philosophies had told them that the “body” cannot rise, and St Paul reminded them that the resurrection of Jesus Christ proves that it is possible: “But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead” (1 Cor 16:19). Not only that, Christ's resurrection is the promise of the future glory that awaits those who trust in Him, He is the “fruits fruits” (Ibid).
We too live in a world where few people believe in life after death, at least in any explicit way. And yet this is the most fundamental of all our Christian beliefs, it is the one that affects the whole way we view reality. Jesus pointed this out in the Beatitudes that we just heard: He said happy are the poor, and alas to you who are rich. These are statements that are meaningless nonsense if there is no hereafter. They only make sense as a promise by Our Lord that in eternal life every injustice will be resolved, and the happiness He calls us to will be achieved.
If we really believe this then it turns all worldly values upside down. What matters ceases to be whether or not I possess something, or whether I am financially secure. What matters is whether or not doing or not doing something will help me on the way to heaven. Everything else is secondary. We do, and should, joyfully accept good things as gifts from God, little tasters (appetisers) of the happiness of heaven, and yet we must still not value them as ends in themselves.
(pause)
The question today's readings put to us is: Where do I put my trust, in God or in my possessions? I may not have a pension plan, but that doesn't mean that I'm not materialistic in my outlook. The real pension plan that I need to save for in the one that only fully matures in heaven.
7th February 2010, The Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Lk 5:1-11
Last week I spoke about something very simple but very important, namely, the need to act with love as the spirit that animates our activity. This week I want to speak about something equally simple and equal important: the INTENTION that motivates our action -because this is another thing that can totally change an activity.
In our gospel today we heard two different ways that Peter went fishing, two different ways that were only different in the fact that they had two different intentions. The first time the intention behind his fishing was just a normal intention most people would have: to do work, to earn money, maybe to support a family. The second time the intention was different: he did it for Jesus, and only for Jesus -as we heard him explain, it seemed hopeless and illogical to him, BUT because Jesus asked it therefore he did it: he did it for Jesus. The first time when he worked for the more mundane intention he worked hard and got nothing: "we worked hard all night long and caught nothing". However, when he did the same thing for Jesus it became easy and it became fruitful.
People sometimes ask me what it means to do something "for Jesus". And I want to point out something in this miracle that helps illustrate: Who do you think got to eat and sell the fish that Peter caught in the miraculous catch, the catch that Peter only achieved when he finished because Jesus had told him to fish? It would seem that it was the very same people that would have eaten and sold the fish if they had managed to catch any as they were labouring all through the night, namely, Peter and his companions.
The simple corollary for ourselves is that when we do things "for Jesus" we end up not having less for ourselves but having more, and we likewise don't have less for friends and family because we've offered it to the Lord.
For example, when I seek to love my friend and I seek to do things for my friend I am often, in reality, doing things for myself because of how it will benefit ME to have my friend happy. But if, in contrast, I love my friend "for Jesus’s sake”, then I love my friend more purely and more selflessly - I love my friend in a way that is better for my friend, and is in fact better for me.
If, when you work to earn a salary for your family you offer this work "for Jesus", then your family likewise gets more from this not less.
If you are washing your child's laundry and you offer this work "for Jesus", then likewise your child's clothes are still washed.
And if you doing your own laundry and our own cleaning and your own cooking, and you offer it to the Lord – then it all still gets done – but everything is raised to a higher end: the Lord.
Now, to do this on a habitual basis is difficult because it requires that we continually remember the Lord in order to offer things to the Lord. But, like all habits the more we practice it the easier it becomes.
To do this on a habitual basis also requires faith: it requires believing that God is actually interested in the details of our lives. That this fact is true is something that has been lived out by the saints down the ages. It is also something expressed in practices like that of making a morning offering - I have included in this week's newsletter two examples of morning offering prayers, one for adults and another for children. A morning offering looks ahead to every detail of the day and forms a general intention to offer it all to the Lord, so that even though our concentration will wander through the day we have at least made this our general intention. And we can renew this intention at the end of the day looking back at every detail of the day that has gone and letting go of any attachment to self and giving it to God.
And God is interested in the details of your day because He is interested in you, and your day consists of details not just big things.
And why should we do any of this? We can offer our day and our lives to Jesus because life is easier when we live it for Jesus, just as Peter found his fishing easier and more fruitful when did it the Jesus. But ultimately the real reason we should live for Jesus and offer everything we do to Jesus is because we owe it to Him: Everything we have we have from Him and so it is a simple matter of justice that we should lovingly offer it back to Him.
An Adult's Morning Offering Prayer
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus,
through the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
and in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world,
I offer You my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day
for the love of God,
in reparation for sins,
for the conversion of sinners,
for the intentions of all my friends and family,
for all who have asked me to pray for them, in general and in particular,
and for the intentions of our Holy Father the Pope. Amen.
A Child's Morning Offering Prayer
Good morning, dear Jesus,
I offer you this day
All that I do and think and say.
Dear Mary his mother
See what I do
Give it to Jesus
And be my mother too. Amen.
31st January 2010, The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Cor 12:31-13:13
We just heard in our second reading St Paul tell us that love is the thing that lasts. Thinking of what ‘lasts’: At the end of the day, as I’m getting ready to go to bed, I often wonder about what will last out of the work I've done that day. Often it can seem in the many little chores that can make up a day that none of them are really worthwhile that none of them are significant enough to say, "I did something WORTHY today! Today I did something that will LAST!"
There are however three things I try to remind myself: that we never know the full results of our actions so we must just do the right thing and leave the results up to God, that many of most important things in life are actually not that glamorous even though they are important, but thirdly, for most good deeds what changes a moderately good deed into an exceptionally good deed is not its exterior grandness but the LOVE with which we do it, and this is one of the ways that love “remains”, as St Paul says.
Pope Benedict, in his recent encyclical, pointed out that some people today can be dismissive of love because they confuse it with mere sentiment and emotion (c.f. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (2009), n.3) -this is one of the reasons that we need to remember that love goes with the knowledge of faith and the motivating direction of hope.
Thinking of what lasts, I want to say a word about heaven.
When the saints have tried to describe for us what heaven is like they frequently point out that the degree of glory and the degree of happiness that we will possess in heaven will be the same measure of the degree of love that we have lived on earth.
One of the symbolic descriptions of this has been to say that heaven is like a fast room full of many chalices, chalices of lots of different sizes, different sizes but with each one filled to the brim. The image of being ‘filled to the brim’ captures the notion that everyone in heaven is perfectly happy in heaven. But the image of the different sizes tells us something too: while we live on earth we are responding and co-operating (and not cooperating) with God's grace in such a way that we are forming and making ourselves, we are making ourselves more or less capable of being filled with God's love. This is like making ourselves into a smaller or bigger chalice -each chalice capable of being filled, but being filled according to how big it has made itself.
Back to love: There is one thing in particular that is the measure of our spiritual ‘size’ on earth and our corresponding spiritual size in heaven, and that measure is love: the divine charity dwelling within us, or not. Speaking more precisely, the theologians of the Church describe this in terms of the doctrine of merit: building on the merits of Jesus Christ on the cross, our degree of merit corresponds to the measure of love in our actions.
So, coming back to my end of day ponderings over what will last out of my day's activity:
the activity that I've done with love will last forever, it will be the measure of my perfection in heaven just as it has been the measure of my perfection on earth. We often feel best when we have done something that feels ‘grand’, but we SHOULD feel best when we recognise that we have done something in a more LOVING manner.
So when I take the garbage out, or when I collect the newsletters that people have yet again left scattered on the pews, the measure of love is what measures how perfect this activity is: if I do it with patient knowing that this simple activity is what God needs me to do because someone needs to do it, if I do it offering it to God is a loving and thus fragrant sacrifice to the Almighty, these are the type of things that make this same act possessed with more or less love; and these are the type of things that leave me filled with more or less love with more or less merit as a bigger or smaller chalice ready to be perfected and filled in heaven. It is the love in me that remains.
24th January 2010, The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Lk 1:1-4;4:14-21; Neh 8:2-10
Often when I visit Catholic homes I can see the family Bible placed somewhere prominent and important on the bookshelf. Prominent, important and dusty. It may have been bought with good intentions, but like many things, reading the Bible can be a neglected part of our faith, and our Bibles can end up with years of dust built on top. Other homes may not have Bibles at all.
I went to the funeral of one of the more popular priests of the Dorset deanery yesterday, Fr Geoffrey Watts, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack age 63. And, as at every funeral, at the start the Gospel book was placed on the coffin and the word, “in life, Fr Geoffrey cherished the Gospel of Christ, may Christ now greet him with these word of eternal life: come blessed of my Father”. And I thought, as these words were said of my brother priest: someday those words will be said of me, but will they be TRUE of me – do I CHERISH the Word of God? Because I say those words over many coffins and it is sometimes less true and sometimes more true.
Today, both our Gospel and our First Reading give accounts of people readings from the Scriptures – and the Jews treasured their Scriptures highly. There was no chance of Jesus getting to Nazareth, asking for the Scriptures, and being told, “Now I’m sure we had one somewhere around the place”.
The Jews treasured their Scriptures with good reason – they knew that it was their Scriptures that recalled their identity to them. It was there that they had a RECORD of what God had done for them, how He had rescued them from Egypt, from Babylon, how He’d taught them, and given them the Law on Mount Sinai.
As Catholics, it is often said that we don’t read the Bible much. And on one level it is true that we are not “people of the book” in the way that Protestants are: as Catholics, we hold that Scripture needs Tradition and the Church with it. The Scriptures need a context in which to be interpreted and understood, so they need to be seen in the light of the Sacred Tradition of the Church. We also need to remember that there are truths of our faith that are passed down by spoken word and tradition as St. Paul puts it (2 Thess 2:15; 2 Tim 2:2), as well as in what was written in the Bible. In addition, as well as needing the tradition as the context to interpret the Scripture we also need an authority to give an authentic interpretation of the Scriptures, which is especially important for much debated texts, and this is why God gave us the apostles, and their successors the Pope and Bishops.
But we cannot forget the fact that we DO need to know the Scriptures, because otherwise we do not know the true God. We may have our own thoughts, our own memories and images, but the only way we know if they are true is if they measure up to the truth as we find it in the Scriptures. As the great St. Jerome put it, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ”. Christ is THE Word of God, the complete one Word spoken by the Father, and He has nothing more to say. If we want to know what He has said, then we must read and be familiar with the Scriptures.
This is why, when we come to Mass every Sunday we don’t hear some nice quotes from popular modern poets, and we don’t hear readings from great politicians. We hear readings from the Bible, the Sacred Scriptures, because this is the written record of God’s holy Word.
And we believe that the Scriptures are not JUST records of what Jesus did and taught, but they are the INSPIRED record – so that they are free from all error. While we need to analyse the context and meaning of different texts, distinguishing poetry and imagery in the Old Testament, from historical fact in the Gospel accounts – it is nonetheless all written for our good. As the Good Book itself says, “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Tim 3:17)
If you don’t already do so, I’d urge you all to put aside some regular brief time to read the Bible, preferably daily. Find where that Bible is, blow the dust off it, and set yourself to learn more about the Christ who is eternal life. And if you don’t have one already – we can order you one in the bookstall. Jesus said that that text was being fulfilled even as the people listened – let’s make sure we know the text, so that we can know when it is fulfilled in our hearts.
17th January 2010, The Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jn 2:1-12; Isa 62:1-5
This Christmas I'm sure that a great many of you were given things that you didn't really want. For example, across our entire country I wonder how many men opened the wrapping to find inside a tie that they could never picture themselves wearing.
For myself, this Christmas I was giving a pair of "welly warmers” - big loose fleece liners to go inside my Wellington boots. On Christmas day this seemed to be the most useless and unwanted present I had received some time. However, a week and a half ago we had the first of a series of snow falls, and I have worn my wellies more this last week than during the entire previous year, and my “welly warmers” have been manifested to be the surprise most useful Christmas gift of 2009!
Sometimes things are revealed to be much more than we first thought them to be. “Welly warmers” might be a supremely trivial example, but I start with that example as an illustration of how Jesus was manifested to be much more than He was thought to be when He worked His miracle at the wedding feast at Cana.
One of the things that we need to recall in considering how Jesus was revealed, manifested at His first miracle, is the simple fact that His followers didn't really know Him yet. They knew that this was the man that John the Baptist was talking about 'preparing the way for'; this was the man about whom John the Baptist said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (Jn 1:29). They knew enough that Andrew said to his brother Peter, "We have found the Messiah" (Jn 1:41). They knew enough that they were following, that they had responded to His call, “Follow me” (Jn 1:43). And, given that Galilee was a small place and Nazareth and Capernaum small towns, it is conceivable that they would have heard of the events surrounding His birth: the choirs of angels appearing to shepherds, the star in the sky, and the Gentile wise men coming from the east.
There were at least two more things that were revealed to them, and are revealed to us, by His first miracle at Cana. The first, more symbolically, is the significance of the wedding feast as the context for the miracle. When you heard our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah, you might have thought it was unrelated to this: it was a description in the Old Testament of the love that God had for His Chosen People, a love such that He called Himself the ‘bridegroom’ and His people the ‘bride’ – “no longer are you to be named ‘Forsaken’... but you shall be called ‘My Delight’ and your land ‘The Wedded’ ” (Isa 62:4). When Jesus came as the long awaited Messiah He came as the loving bridegroom coming to save His bride. The fact that He worked His first miracle in the context of a wedding feast is taken to be one of the ways that He claimed to be the Messiah. And for us today, we know that the love that the Bridegroom, the Messiah, the "Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world", was ultimately manifested on the cross. And the role of the Messiah as a LOVING Bridegroom is one of the things manifested at Cana.
The second thing revealed at Cana was both simple and important: the Messiah was to be a miracle-worker. We ourselves are probably so familiar with Jesus that we forget the significance of His working miracles. At one level His miracles were significant in proving His claim to be the Messiah and His claim to be God. But at a deeper level His miracles also show us HOW the loving Bridegroom cares for His Bride:
The loving Bridegroom cared for His Bride by healing her many wounds: He healed the sick, He raised the dead, He forgave sin. But the loving Bridegroom also cared for His Bride by satisfying her needs: He fed the 5,000 when they were hungry in the wilderness, and, as we recall today, He even provided them with wine when they didn't have enough. And this is a sign of how the Lord provides for US in our needs, TODAY.
As I have said in previous weeks, today’s gospel is the conclusion of a three-week epiphany: His manifestation to the wise men from the east as the King for the Gentiles and not just the Jews; His manifestation at His baptism in the Jordan as the “Son” of the Father; and today, His manifestation as the loving Bridegroom who CARES for His Bride – His Bride being us, being the People who choose to follow Him; His manifestation as the miracle-worker who has the power to give us what we need.
10th January 2010, The Baptism of The Lord
Lk 3:15-16; 21-22
Today, in Church, we still have our Christmas decorations: we have the Christmas tree, we have the crib. Today, in Church, we are still within what the Church calls the Christmas season. And yet, today we celebrate a feast that seems to not be a Christmas feast, namely, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. We do this with two basic reasons.
First, today's feast is a continuation of the Epiphany. The word "epiphany" means "manifestation": a showing of the baby Jesus to the wise men who came from the East, a showing of the Jewish Messiah to the Gentile nations who had come to worship Him. The feast of the Baptism of the Lord continues this showing by the fact that the voice spoke from heaven at His baptism and publicly declared who He was (and is): “You are my Son, the Beloved”. So today is another epiphany, and it is part of the threefold epiphany that will conclude next week when the gospel for year C maintains the ancient tradition of concluding this epiphany with the showing of Jesus in His first miracle of the marriage feast of Cana, where He changed water to wine (Jn 2:1-11).
But there is a second reason why today's feast belongs in Christmastide, and it's a more subtle reason: His baptism in the River Jordan was another type of birth, a sort of sacramental birth that followed on from His physical birth that was celebrated on Christmas Day. (In saying that, I follow the Church in drawing on the ancient sermon of St Maximus of Turin, Office of readings for 11th January, between the Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord).
At Christmas He was born of a virgin, at His baptism He was ‘generated’ (St Maximus) in the water. In Bethlehem His Blessed Mother presented Him to the Magi, that the Magi might adore Him; in the River Jordan the voice of the Father spoke from heaven and presented His Son to the world, that the world might adore Him. At His physical birth the Virgin Mary embraced Him with a mother's love, in the River Jordan God the Father embraced Him with a fatherly love.
But there is another truth that connects these two mysteries, and that is the fact that Jesus did not do either of these things for Himself, rather, He did them for us. Did the Divine Son of the Father need to leave heaven and be born of a virgin? Not for His sake, only for ours. Did the Incarnate Son need to be purified, reborn in the waters of the River Jordan? Not for His sake (he was sinless), only for ours.
As the liturgy prayers say of the waters of the River Jordan, they were "waters made holy by the one who was baptised" - and those waters were made holy by His baptism so that in our baptism we might be made holy, we might become adopted children of the Father, as sons in the Son. Jesus consecrated Himself in His baptism that we might be consecrated in our baptism: as He said later in the Gospels, “I consecrate myself FOR THEIR SAKE”(Jn 17:19).
Today, therefore, might be seen as a celebration of OUR birthday, our sacramental birthday. In our Christian re-birth we die and rise with Christ, but the means by which we do this is the sacrament of baptism, the sacrament that Christ established by sending out His apostles at the end of the Gospel to baptise “the nations”(Mt 28:19), but that He first made possible by being baptised Himself - that our Baptism might be a union with Him and to Him. That is why it is in Christmastime, in the season of His physical birth, that we celebrate what was both His and our sacramental re-birth.
3rd January 2010, The Epiphany
Today, on the feast of Epiphany, we recall how the Wise Men from the East came bearing gifts for the new-born King of the Jews, namely, Christ. This is one of the reasons why it is traditional for us to exchange gifts at Christmas time, also following the example of St Nicholas the third century bishop in Turkey whose feast is 6 December and two was renowned for giving gifts, especially to children.
When we think of the gifts presented at the epiphany it is common to reflect on what one of our hymns calls the "mystic meaning" of these gifts. We have no real idea as to why, in their own minds, the wise men gave these specific gifts, but there are some very clear symbolisms.
Incense is offered before the deity, and so frankincense is a gift fit for the divine Christ-child.
Gold is fit for a king, for He who is a King of Kings.
Myrrh is perhaps the most striking of the gifts. Myrrh is the perfume traditionally used to anoint the dead, something people rarely choose to focus on at a birth -it would be like buying one of those advance funeral payment plans and presenting it to two parents at the birth of their child: rather odd. But Christ was no ordinary child, He is the one who entered this world to die, to die for us.
The gifts that the Magi brought were gifts worthy to worship the newborn Christ. I would suggest to you today, that we would do well to ask ourselves what gift we would bring to the newborn King today. The popular Christmas Carol says "I will give my heart", and I suggest you that today is a good day press to combine such a thought with our New Year resolutions.
New Year resolutions are a very Catholic notion, a very sacramental notion: taking a specific moment as a specific opportunity, an opportunity to change, to repent, to find something in my heart that I will present anew to the Lord.
New Year's Day has already passed but I don't think it's too late to make a resolution for the year. The last two years my primary resolution has been to stop pressing the snooze button on my alarm clock, and while I have got better this, I must confess that this year it is again my primary resolution, so I'm adding it with a new twist to something else again this year.
So, like the Magi, let us today make an offering to the Lord, a gift worthy of Him.
But I would offer a final thought: let us recall the symbolism of the offering that is made in every Mass: the bread and wine are brought forward in procession, symbols of the offerings of our whole lives and of the whole congregation.
And this bread and wine, unworthy and inadequate an offering as it is, this offering is taken by Christ and transformed into the one fitting act of worship: is transformed into Christ Himself, His Body, His Blood, His Soul and His Divinity, and it is all offered to the Father -the selfsame sacrifice that He offered once on Calvary is made present again on the altar at Mass.
The wise men from the East, if they had truly known who lay before them in the manger, would have felt that even their gifts of mystic meaning were inadequate for such a king. If we realise that our lives are not worthy to be gifts presented to the King, then let us remember that He knows this already, that He loves us despite this, and that He wants our gifts and offerings despite this, for He is the one who takes what we give Him and transforms it into an offering that is even more.
If this page does not contain a sermon that you are looking for, please click here to go to Father Dylan's blog where you may find it.